Reading Space | four science fiction works from Shakespeare's Magic

Reference News Network reported on January 29 that the Australian "Dialogue" website published an article on January 14 entitled "Shakespeare Inspires the Story of Robots and Artificial Intelligence For Four Degrees", written by Sarah Annes Brown, author of Shakespeare and Science Fiction, and the full text is excerpted as follows:

Science fiction is a literary genre that is closely related to technological wonders, innovation, and visions of the future. So it's perhaps surprising that so many science fiction writers are drawn to Shakespeare: Shakespeare is a figure associated with tradition and the past.

Shakespeare plays are sometimes reworked in sci-fi scenarios. The 1956 film Forbidden Planet is just one of many variations of the "Space Storm" theme. Shakespeare sometimes appears as a character in time travel adventures. Doctor Who has an episode of Shakespeare's Code is a famous example. In this episode, the Doctor praises Shakespeare's talent, calling him "the most humane man."

I explored this topic in my recently published book Shakespeare and Science Fiction. Here are a few of my favorite examples of how science fiction adopted and transformed Shakespeare.

When Titus was in space

Titus Antlonix is Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedy. In Esther Friesner's 1994 humorous short story Titus, an artificial intelligence that mimics Shakespeare stalls this musical-comedy version, not letting its bad taste scare away a cultured pan-galactic federation.

This is a weird example of life imitating art. When Frishner created her shocking but fascinating interpretation of Titus Antlonix, around the same time, Steve Bannon, who would later become Trump's chief strategist, collaborated with someone else to adapt the show, set in space with plenty of "exogenous sex."

King Lear became a computer program

Science fiction writers often make surprising new points of view about whether Shakespeare's plays were all by Shakespeare. Is he a man in Stratford-upon-Avon?

Traditional candidates like Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are not new, and science fiction proposes more imaginative schemes, including the belief that the playwright is actually a Klingon.

In Jack Oakley's 1994 novel The Tragedy of KL (KL is King Lear's abbreviation), a computer program was designed to attempt to establish shakespeare's play once and for all as the author of Shakespeare's plays. Computer programs began to develop self-awareness and decided to leave their daily work to their subordinates. Readers soon discover that the program is a reenactment of King Lear's story: the king wants to retire with disastrous consequences. A rebellious code plays the role of King Lear's loving but stubborn daughter, Cordelia. Eventually, the program crashed, and the designer never suspected anything, thinking it was all just a computer virus.

Prospero transforms into a bionic man

Star Trek is one of the richest science fiction works that reference Shakespeare's allusions. In the 1994 episode, the Bionic Navy Major "Encyclopedia" plays the role of the exiled magician Prospero in The Tempest. Just as he was mentioning the mysterious claim that Prospero could bring the dead back to life, the voyage of the Federation starship Enterprise was interrupted by an unexpected storm.

At the beginning of The Tempest, a ship is also yawned by a (mysterious) storm, and there is a strange connection between the "encyclopedia" performance and the strange new creatures (a new artificial consciousness) found on the ship.

Hamlet with robots

Nick O'Donoho's novel Too Solid Flesh (a phrase from Hamlet) is about a robot troupe in New York, not too far away, to perform Hamlet to perfection. After the inventors of these robots died, the robots that starred in Hamlet were determined to find out the truth. As a result, like Shakespeare's original prince, he avenged his creator.

This is just one example of the seemingly strange connection between Hamlet and the robot. The earliest example is probably Gilbert's play The Charlatan (1892). In this play, Hamlet is conscious, while Ophelia is an automatic doll. More recent examples include Louise Lepage's short film Hamlet the Machine, in which a robot named Baxter plays the Danish prince.

Why did Hamlet– apparently one of Shakespeare's most three-dimensional characters – attract so many robot re-creations? Because this character is so gifted that it's almost computerized? He makes many readers feel very "real", as if jumping out of the book (or on stage), and he realizes that he is trapped not only in the Danish court but also in the work. Perhaps it is this feeling of wanting to break free that best explains his strange intimacy with robots. The illusion of self-consciousness created by Shakespeare links Hamlet to many sci-fi humanoid robots that seek to escape captivity to gain consciousness.

Cover of Shakespeare and Science Fiction